Automatic, custom Eagle schematics

It’s a simple fact that for every circuit you design, someone else has done it before. If you’re working on a high altitude balloon project, there’s already a project out there with a microcontroller, barometric pressure sensor, and an SD card somewhere out there in a corner of the Internet. Google will only help so much if you want to copy these previous builds, which led [Ben] to come up with a better solution. He took dozens of building blocks for basic digital projects and put them all into one really great interface called HackEDA.

The premise is simple: most electronic projects are just electronic Lego. You connect your microcontroller to a sensor, add in a battery, throw in a few caps and resistors for good measure, and hopefully everything will work. HackEDA takes all those basic building blocks – microcontrollers, power sources, and sensors – and creates a custom Eagle schematic with all the parts your project needs

HackEDA is still very much in beta, so there aren’t a whole lot of building blocks to choose from. That said, being able to generate an Eagle schematic with all the parts necessary for your next project is a boon. With this, all you need for a final circuit board is to create a new board file, hit the autorouter, and spend a half hour fixing whatever mess the autorouter made.

Site is down… made in python and spilling code everywhere in the forum, some code seems not to be thread safe and crashes on creating new users (looks like i tried to register at the same time as someone else and the code confused the new user ids)

I definitely plan to do that. I want to spend a little while working kinks out, then open it up for submissions. I also want to be very careful about only accepting designs that are legit, you can get all the parts for, and will work well with the rest of the system, so that may take a little while to set up.

It’s up. People are using it like crazy, and I’m surprised it has done so well this far.

Try all lowercase. The current authentication backend requires this for some reason. I’ll put a note on the signup page until I can fix it.

Also, FYI, everything is public except for posting to the forum. Later there will be some pretty cool stuff that requires a login, though, and I’ll probably send a notice about that to registered users, so your call on signing up now or not.

I’d like to see a way to give feedback on a circuit. Maybe as simple as thumbs up/down. Or marking a circuit that you have used it successfully. So in the future when there are 17 slight variations on a particular I2C temperature sensor IC interface, someone can tell which is likely “good”.

Yes, definitely. I think this sort of thing is way more useful once people can put their knowledge and experiences back into it. I do, however, want to try to avoid the 17 slight variations. I think that can be a problem with a lot of open designs out there. Bad signal to noise ratio. I don’t pretend I know what the best method to handle that is, but a little curation could go a long way. Possibly everything starts out as a personal design, then some sort of verification process promotes it to an “everybody” design.

I like Amazon’s rating/review format. With x.x/5 stars, and n reviews you can get a feel for both how good and how popular something is. Confirmed “actual” uses is great.

I also want people to be able to ask questions and post how-to’s that are linked to specific circuits. And make circuit recipes. Small steps.

Circuit upload is first, then feedback. If anyone would like to be a alpha tester for uploading send me an email: ben@(appropriate domain name).com

one thing to consider, unless things have changed, if you import a part of a schematic someone made with a version of eagle that is pirated the whole schematic will be contaminated and can no longer be opened in new versions of eagle